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Carla Saunders and Kyle Cook

Kyle Cook and Carla Saunders are neonatal nurse practitioners at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville.

They’ve spent decades caring for infants, but when the opioid crisis began to hit in 2010, their jobs changed in ways they never anticipated.

Tennessee has seen a sharp increase in babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), a condition marked by tremors and constant shaking in babies who experience withdrawal. In fact, over the past decade, the incidence of babies born with NAS in the state has risen nearly ten-fold.

Kyle and Carla came to StoryCorps to remember when they began to notice how this affected their patients firsthand.

Over the past several years, Kyle and Carla helped establish one of the first treatment protocols for babies exposed to opioids, as well as a program connecting mothers with treatment and therapy.

Originally aired September 15, 2017, on NPR’s Morning Edition.

This interview was recorded at the 2016 National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit, in partnership with Operation UNITE.

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Transcript

CS: Summer 2010, we had six babies in the nursery who were in withdrawal.

KC: It was so hard to watch these babies—they would have tremors; they’re inconsolable. And we couldn’t fix it; we couldn’t make these babies better.

And little did we know that was the tip of the iceberg. We had ten, and then 15, and then, at one point, 37 babies in the NICU that were withdrawing. We were bursting at the seams.

CS: We were completely unprepared and short-staffed. And I remember a nurse in tears holding a baby, and this baby is just screaming. And she said, “We have got to do something.” Because what we were doing wasn’t working. And here we were just a small children’s hospital—

KC: Mhmm

CS: —in east Tennessee. And these babies were carrying the flag of the substance abuse problem in the United States. And so we went looking to the experts, you know, ‘Let’s call across the country and let’s find out what’s the best way to treat these babies.’ And then that moment of…

KC: Nobody knows…

CS: …nobody knows.

KC: [laughs] And who knew that we would become the experts?

When you see a baby, especially one that has been in your care for a long time, that has been off the charts in withdrawal, and you’ve done everything you possibly can and you finally get this baby acting like a normal baby, and then he smiles at you—

CS: Mhmm

KC: —And to know that you’ve made a difference in a mother’s life—I mean, that will carry you through the darkest times, knowing that, my gosh, we did this.